The power of liberalism can combat oppression in all its forms
True liberals stand for individual freedom, explains Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, an iconoclastic economist
TYRANNY COMES in many guises. Sometimes it is in the obvious form of dictators who act outside the law and terrorise people to perpetuate their rule. But in less odious and visible forms, it can refer to the ways that individuals may be oppressed by governments that genuinely aim to do good for their citizens.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is an economist and the paragon of an uncompromising liberal. Her scholarly work has taken on such topics such as how the fuel of capitalism is less about financial accumulation and more about innovation and ideas. But her personal narrative is also part of her liberal ethos: in 1995, when known as Donald, she chose to transition to female—only to experience intolerance even by those who proclaimed themselves libertarians.
The same freedom that lets buyers and sellers trade and believers worship a God of their choosing should also enable a person to eshew their birth sex and become another gender if their conscience dictates and medical science allows. What else would modern liberalism stand for, if not a matter as both radical and banal as that?
As part of The Economist’s Open Future initiative to spur a global conversation on freedom in the 21st century, we are publishing an excerpt from Ms McCloskey’s latest book, “Why Liberalism Works: How true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all” (Yale University Press, 2019). Below that is a short interview with her.
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Modern Liberals Are Not Conservatives, Nor Statists
Excerpt from “Why Liberalism Works” by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Yale University Press, 2019).
Modern liberals do not sit anywhere along the conventional one-dimensional right-left spectrum of governmental coercion. The spectrum stretches from a violently compelled right-conservative policy of imperial wars to a violently compelled left-US-“liberal” policy of class warfare. Along the spectrum the question is merely in which direction the massive coercion is to be applied, and neither rightist not leftist pauses to question its massiveness. The wind is toward the left, Olaf Palme, the socialist prime minister of Sweden, is supposed to have said. Let us make sail. Anywhere along the spectrum the government exercises compulsion backed by police.
Nowadays such policies penetrate unusually deeply into people’s lives. To be governed under such a régime is to be ruled, bossed, taxed, drafted, redistributed, questioned, rousted, coerced, beaten, watched, overseen, inspected, judged, nudged, prohibited, licensed, regulated, expropriated, propagandized, pushed, gassed, tasered, shot, jailed, and executed. Yes, occasionally benefited, too. But at whose cost in compulsion and corruption?
The true liberal, by contrast, sits up on a second dimension, the non-policy apex of a triangle, so to speak. That is, we liberals […] are neither conservatives nor socialists. The liberal economist and political philosopher Hayek argued in “Why I Am Not a Conservative” that both conservatives and socialists believe, with most lawyers and soldiers and bureaucrats, that “order [is] … the result of the continuous attention of authority.” In a word, they advocate statism. The extravagant modern growth of law as legislation, to be contrasted with the older notion of law as the discovered good or bad customs of our community, embodies such a belief. Both ends of the conventional spectrum of massive governmental coercion, and the middle, too, Hayek continued, “lack faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment.”
[…]
The modern liberal economist Donald Boudreaux writes that “many people believe that we human beings left undirected by a sovereign power are either inert blobs, capable of achieving nothing, or unintelligent and brutal barbarians destined only to rob, rape, plunder, and kill each other until and unless a sovereign power restrains us and directs our energies onto more productive avenues.” That’s why the statists left or right think they need massive coercion, in order to compel the barbarians and blockheads to get organized.
[…]
Yet modern liberalism fits the modern world of high human capital better than the old rightish model of dim-witted peasants properly led by the aristocracy or the old leftish model of gormless proletarians properly led by The Party. If ever there was a time to let people go, and to have a go, it is now, when they are so obviously ready for a liberal autonomy. Yesterday, one might put it, was the time for the aristocracy or the state. Now is the time for liberalism.
The conservative/reactionary believes that social customs, even if long-lived, are terribly fragile in the face of the irritating changes we see daily, such as a falling away from religious belief or the coming of gay marriage. And on the other end of the spectrum the progressive/socialist believes that nothing will happen to bad customs unless she makes a law to change them. She is confident that she knows what the future laws will bring. I mean, it says so right here in the law that, say, poor people’s wages can be raised by passing a minimum wage. Fifteen dollars. Twenty. Heck, why not one hundred?
“The [real] liberal,” by contrast, Hayek wrote, “accept[s] changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about.” No one in 1960 anticipated the internet. No one in 1900 anticipated that autos could safely whiz past each other a few feet apart on two-lane roads at a combined speed of 120 miles per hour. Almost no one in 1800 anticipated the Great Enrichment (amounting, the economic historians have discovered to some 3,000 percent per person.) Almost no one in 1700 anticipated liberalism. Yet, like evolution in animals or in art or in language or in science, the necessary adaptions were brought about, with few if any visible hands of extraction and governance.
People did it, not the governments. The Nobel economist Vernon Smith expressed the point this way: “The early ‘law-givers’ did not make the law they ‘gave’; they studied social traditions and informal rules and gave voice to them, as God’s, or natural, law. The common lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, championed seventeenth-century social norms as law commanding higher authority than the king. … Mining claims were defined, established, and defended by the guns of the mining clubbers, whose rules were later to become part of public mining law.”
Donald Boudreaux commenting on Smith’s passage writes, “No myth is responsible for as much mischief … [as the one] that proclaims that social order must be designed. … And no particular instance of this myth is worse than that which insists that law—the rules that govern human interactions—is and can only be the product of the state.”
A conservative admires such spontaneous evolution up to a couple of decades before the present, yet is angry and fearful about any recent or, God help us, future evolution. Adoption of children by gay couples, say. Yuk. A social democrat, on the other hand, does not admire many of the evolutions up to the present, and is confident she can lay down a better future by compelling you to give up your stuff and your liberty—for your own welfare, dear. Industrial policy, say. The true liberal person, by contrast, admires some old evolutions—English common law, for instance, though not its enslaving doctrine of femme couverte—and looks with a cheery confidence to a future of unforced evolutions by liberated if constitutionally and especially ethically constrained adults, whatever in the world the evolutions might turn out to be.
At root, then, a true liberal, and the minority of liberals among Republicans and Democrats, Tories and Labourites, believes that, as much as possible, no one should push people around, standing over them with a gun or a fist to force them to do his will. It is an ethical conviction. The modern liberal, I have noted, abhors hierarchies of men over women, masters over slaves, politicians over citizens. The great American liberal philosopher David Schmidtz argues that each person’s “right to say no” is vital, “the backbone of cooperation among self-owners.” Said Bartleby the scrivener in Melville’s tale of 1853, “I would prefer not to.” As a free man and no slave, he could say no, whether or not it was good for him. He was an adult, and as an adult he was owed respect for his preferences, if not a paid job.
The Economist: The term liberalism has long been a political football or societal voodoo doll. What actually is liberalism?
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey: It is the theory that everyone should be a non-slave (Latin liber)—poor men, all women, all queers, all colours and religions and whatever. It was born in the 18th century, first in Holland then England then Scotland. It looked bizarre to a society accustomed to rule by lords and priests. The so-called “new liberalism” of the 1880s in Britain diverged sharply from the liberalism espoused in the columns of The Economist newspaper from 1843 onwards. Like continental and then Fabian socialism, and later an American progressivism eager to sterilise women and keep out immigrants, the new liberalism wanted mere citizens to revert to childhood. The mum-and-dad state were to give the pathetic little creatures their due, thank you very much.
The Economist: You took 384 pages to explain "Why Liberalism Works" (the title of your book). May I be terribly unfair and challenge you to explain it in 150 words?
Ms McCloskey: Easy. The L-word is not taken to mean American “liberalism,” the distressingly anti-liberal, lawyer-driven politics of increasing governmental planning and regulation and physical coercion. It is instead the rest of the world’s “liberalism,” economist driven, “the liberal plan,” as old Adam Smith wrote in 1776, “of [social] equality, [economic] liberty and [legal] justice,” with a modest, restrained government giving real help to the poor. True modern liberalism.
A liberal “rhetoric” explains the good features of the modern world compared with earlier and later illiberal régimes—the economic success of the modern world, its arts and sciences, its kindness, its toleration, its inclusiveness, and especially its massive liberation of more and more people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern. Its enemies claim that it also explains alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money or the loss of community or the calamity of immigration by non-Christians. But they are mistaken.
(That’s 150 words on the button, a selection from the first two paragraphs of the book.)
The Economist: Shouldn't a faith in liberal values be “symmetrically axiomatic”—ie, that your ability to think and speak as you wish depends on you granting me the same; that my rights and dignity derive from me upholding yours... If this seems so obvious, how is it possible that a belief in liberalism has frayed so badly?
Ms McCloskey: Yes, symmetrical. Instead of unequal liberties, plural, give everyone the same liberty, singular. Liberalism is from top to bottom egalitarian. Sandra Peart and David Levy speak of “analytical egalitarianism,” for example that you, the proud analyst of the “entrepreneurial state,” are not to think of yourself as smarter than real entrepreneurs. If you were, dearie, you would be rich, eh?
It’s what Huck Finn on the raft came to believe about the slave Jim, and was willing to suffer Hell’s fire for the belief. He and Jim were equal, liberally. He couldn’t take from Jim a right he claimed for himself, to light out for the territories, say. Liberalism frays when people want to stay as children, and love the dad on his white horse promising the children billions for the NHS and whiskey galore.
The Economist: What can be done to restore a shared respect for liberal values as the bedrock of our society, politics and economics?
Ms McCloskey: Tell people that liberalism is “adult,” and urge them to realise that they don’t really want to remain children. Tell them that a liberal society becomes rich without coercion. Tell them that liberalism has been the best program of help for the poor and handicapped. Tell them that real incomes, as any economic historian can affirm, have risen since 1800 for the poorest among us by literally thousands of percent points.
Tell them that Marx, though the greatest social scientist of the 19th century, was mistaken about nearly everything. Yet the only way any of this is going to matter is if journalists, novelists, song writers and movie makers come to know it’s true. So long as they think that Marx was basically right, and that enriching the poor depends on a struggle between capital and labour, nothing will change.
The Economist:A personal question, if I may... You have had to deal with deep issues of existence, individualism, personal rights and dignity, by dint of transitioning from male to female in 1995. Do you feel that this experience is one reason why you are so committed to liberalism, or do you separate your personal narrative from your economic and social analyses?
Ms McCloskey: Yes, although I was stumbling towards such views before 1995, up from youthful socialism. The privileged get irritated or worse by the claims of the non-privileged. Witness the Times columnist Janice Turner, who every couple of months issues a blast against gender crossers. After 1800 liberalism gradually liberated poor white men, American Patriots (not Loyalists), Catholics, slaves, women, Irish, Jews, hillbillies, subjects of fascist tyrannies, colonised peoples, former slaves (again), women (again), other immigrants, gays, handicapped, subjects of socialist tyrannies, Chicanos, native Americans, East Asians, and amazingly, gender crossers.
The result was a fantastic flowering of creativity, from jazz to Steve Jobs, from the novel to Janice Turner’s privilege. I join, and I hope you do, with the African-American poet Langston Hughes, singing in 1936: “O, let America be America again — / The land that never has been yet / —And yet must be—the land where every man is free.” And every woman, dear.
